»Q« wrote:
On Thu, 06 Sep 2012 03:23:52 -0400
"Paul B. Gallagher" <[email protected]> wrote:
MCBastos wrote:
Interviewed by CNN on 05/09/2012 07:45, Richard Owlett told the
world:
The only glitch I forsee is related to when I was trying to
keep two machines I sync. I had a disk crash requireng a new
drive. Although I was making backups of profiles, I've
emails with overlapping date ranges in various backups.
There are likely many duplicates. Any way to merge based on
message ID, rather than a long manual process?
AFAIK, there is no "message ID" for e-mail as is for newsgroups
messages. I mean, there's no inbuilt way to identify two messages as
being actually the same. I suppose it's theoretically possible to
create an add-on that would fingerprint messages in some way -- MD5
of the message body, thinks like that -- and find the duplicates.
But I'm unaware of any add-on like that.
Then what's this? (from your message header)
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Some UAs generate MIDs for mail and some don't. They aren't required.
From what I could tell, I'd always supposed they were generated by the
mail server and incorporated into the sent copy during the handshaking
process. I see now that assumption was false.
I see here <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822> that:
Though optional, every message SHOULD have a "Message-ID:" field.
Furthermore, reply messages SHOULD have "In-Reply-To:" and "References:"
fields as appropriate, as described below. ...
The "Message-ID:" field provides a unique message identifier that refers
to a particular version of a particular message. The uniqueness of the
message identifier is guaranteed by the host that generates it (see
below). This message identifier is intended to be machine readable and
not necessarily meaningful to humans. A message identifier pertains to
exactly one instantiation of a particular message; subsequent revisions
to the message each receive new message identifiers. ...
[end quote]
For practical purposes, the near-ubiquity of message ids should make it
possible to sync all but a very few noncompliant messages, saving the
user a lot of time. If he cares, he can go back and look for dupes, but
in a large enough message store that seems unlikely and impractical.
It'll be a question of whether this is "close enough for rock 'n' roll."
--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
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